Ben Shobe, a soft-spoken attorney who fought to integrate Louisville’s public parks in the 1950s as a pioneering civil rights lawyer and later became one of the first African Americans in Kentucky to serve on a circuit court bench, died early Friday morning. He was 95.

An accomplished trial lawyer, Shobe worked with Thurgood Marshall, then the NAACP’s legal director and later a Supreme Court justice, on a suit to integrate the University of Kentucky law school and was one of several attorneys who successfully battled to admit Lyman Johnson to UK as an undergraduate.

Shobe served as an assistant commonwealth’s attorney, a member of the state worker’s compensation board, a judge on the old Louisville Police Court and Jefferson Circuit Court from 1976 to 1992.

But he probably will be best remembered for his kind demeanor and approachability, said state Sen. Gerald Neal, D-Louisville, one of many black lawyers who cite Shobe as a mentor. “He had a wonderful manner about him that you can only be born with,” Neal said. “Civility was part of his bone and sinew.”

Neal recalled how one defendant actually thanked Shobe after he sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

“Judge Shobe leaned over from the bench towards the man and said, ‘I want you to go there and make the best of it and grow as a human being - and I’ll be checking on you.’

“The man said, ‘Thank you, Judge Shobe,’ ” Neal remembered. “It absolutely floored me. This man was sent to prison and he was thanking the judge for it.”

The Louisville Bar Association now bestows its “civility and professionalism award” in Shobe’s name.

Born on Oct. 2, 1920, in Bowling Green, Benjamin F. Shobe grew up in a black enclave called Jonesville near where Western Kentucky University’s L.T. Smith Stadium now stands.

His mother taught in one of the Rosenwald schools, built in the early 20th century primarily for black children, while his father, the first black man to serve on the state Parole Board, was dean of men at what was then Kentucky State College in Frankfort. The family later moved to Middlesboro, where his father was principal of the local black high school.

Shobe recalled how as a child he witnessed a Ku Klux Klan march through Frankfort and said it was the first and only time he ever saw his father cry.

He attended Kentucky State, where his roommate was Whitney Young Jr., later executive director of the national Urban League.

Barred by his race from attending law school in Kentucky, Shobe enrolled in 1941 at the University of Michigan, taking advantage of a recently passed law that required the state to pay tuition for black students who couldn’t be accommodated in Kentucky.

“Kentucky actually paid for me to go to Michigan” - with a law school then considered second only to Harvard - “to keep me from going to UK or U of L,” Shobe later told the Kentucky Oral History Project.

In the early 1960s, Shobe defended teenagers arrested in protests that led to the passage of legislation to prohibit discrimination in hiring and housing.

Shobe was a member of the "Democratic machine," said Raoul Cunningham, the president of the Louisville Chapter of the NAACP. But when Democrats on the old Board of Aldermen blocked a vote on the anti-discrimination law, Shobe and other civil rights leaders backed Republican mayoral candidate William O. Cowger in the 1961 election. Two years later, when the public accommodation ordinance came up for a vote, Cowger worked hard for its passage.

Shobe said the election of Cowger and other Republicans was important because “it emphasized the importance and strength of the black vote. When they won their races, it was with the support of the black neighborhoods and it made the difference."

In 1973 Shobe was elected judge on the Police Court, where he spruced up a shabby courtroom and made other changes that upgraded the quality of justice it dispensed, The Courier-Journal said in a 1975 editorial.

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The next year Gov. Julian Carroll appointed him to circuit court, and he won election to his first full term in 1977.

"One of the most impressive, knowledgeable dedicated, public servants I met in my lifetime," Carroll said in an interview Friday. "I had such tremendous faith in that appointment because I had such respect for his demeanor. He was a quiet ... he was so soft-hearted in terms of listening and understanding people. I knew I was making one of the best appointments I had ever made."

Shobe could be tough. In 1988, he imposed every year of a 300-year sentence recommended by a jury for a man who was convicted of abducting a 12-year-old Highlands girl from her home and raping her in a city park. “The jury speaks strongly,” Shobe said.

In 1990, ending a controversial case, he threw out a suit filed against The Courier-Journal by the family of a man who said the newspaper violated “all bounds of decency” when it published a front-page picture of the body of a man shot dead during a shooting rampage at Standard Gravure Corp. Ruling for the paper, Shobe said, “it was a public matter ... which the paper had the right to take a picture of.”

“He had a wonderful manner about him that you can only be born with. Civility was part of his bone and sinew”

State Sen. Gerald Neal

The next year, Shobe presided over the sensational trial of pastor John Strange, whom a jury convicted of shooting his wife, chopping her head off, burning her body in a storage building and, with his teenage son, burying her head in their backyard.

In a 2012 ceremony when the Judicial Center’s jury assembly room was named in his honor, former prosecutor John W. Stewart remembered how Shobe had treated each member of the bar, law enforcement, defendants and court personnel with respect and dignity.

“You commanded respect in return,” Stewart said.

Reporter Andrew Wolfson can be reached at (502) 582-7189. Reporter Joseph Gerth also contributed to this story.